70 
where agriculture and horticulture graced the smiling 
landscape. In Sydney, however, Charles Fraser, the 
Colonial Botanist, had been appointed as superintendent 
of the Botanic Gardens in 1816 and had introduced nearly 
3,000 food plants and fruit trees. This was at the time 
considered, perhaps rightly, as the most important aspect 
of his work, and was so successful that special official 
notice was taken by the Colonial Office, which now 
required him to produce half-yearly reports on plants and 
vegetables of New South Wales and of other countries 
useful to the Colony. Fraser received seven shillings a 
day, and out of this had to pay Ids own travelling 
expenses and postages on seeds and plants sent to England. 
One of Ids important duties was t ho growing of vegetables 
for government officials, an assignment that resulted in 
the prompt resignation of Allan Cunningham when many 
years later (1837) he was appointed to the position of 
Colonial Botanist. Fraser, however, had proved the 
value, at least in some respects, of a botanic garden, and 
in 1828, after twelve years work in Sydney, he was 
instructed to proceed to Moreton Bay “to establish a 
public garden at Brisbane Town, to collect the vegetable 
products of the country, and to make observations on 
their uses and importance.'’ He arrived with Allan 
Cunningham at Amity Point on 20th June, 1828, and on 
2nd July went with Captain Logan to the intended site, 
where the first step was the felling of a large Crow’s Ash 
tree. On the following day the boundaries of a 12 acre 
enclosure with a large pond in the centre were marked out. 
That, for the time being, was the end of the project as 
laid down in Sir Thomas Brisbane’s original instructions. 
Eight years afterwards, in 1836, James Backhouse, 
a Quaker philanthropist, visited Brisbane Town and 
described the planting as “22 acres of Government garden 
for the growth of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages and 
other vegetables for the prisoners.” So it remained until 
1855, during the whole of the period when it was under 
military control. It was. however, the forerunner of 
the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, which were established in 
1855 under the supervision of Walter Hill and the 
general control of a committee with R. R. Mackenzie as 
chairman, Walter Hill was born at Scotsdyke, Dumfries- 
shire, Scotland, in 1820. He was trained as a gardener 
and spent two years at the Royal Botanic Gardens, 
Edinburgh from 1811 to 1843, and from 1813 to 1851 was 
at Kew. He came to Sydney in 1852. He went to th Q 
gold diggings in Bendigo and elsewhere and later entered 
